How youth sports shape the economic, academic, and social prospects of Americans.
When pundits discuss the influence of sports on American culture, they often emphasize the negatives: Michael Vick and dogfighting; the steroids scandals in baseball; lewd fan behavior in football; doping incidents in cycling and track. But below the radar of popular athletic culture is something that has profoundly shaped the lives of millions of Americans for the better: youth sports. A growing body of research is showing the social and economic benefits of participation in youth sports to be surprisingly large and overwhelmingly positive. Other things being equal, if a kid plays sports, he will earn more money, stay in school longer, and be more engaged in civic life.
For more than half a century, Americans have proved staggeringly resourceful at finding new ways to spend money.
In the 1950s and ’60s, as credit cards grew in popularity, many began dining out when the mood struck or buying new television sets on the installment plan rather than waiting for payday. By the 1980s, millions of Americans were entrusting their savings to the booming stock market, using the winnings to spend in excess of their income. Millions more exuberantly borrowed against the value of their homes.
But now the freewheeling days of credit and risk may have run their course — at least for a while and perhaps much longer — as a period of involuntary thrift unfolds in many households. With the number of jobs shrinking, housing prices falling and debt levels swelling, the same nation that pioneered the no-money-down mortgage suddenly confronts an unfamiliar imperative: more Americans must live within their means.
I commented to Dave last night that I wished it were three months ago. Three months ago, I felt financially awesome -- I never worried about buying curriculum, books, new clothes for the boys, presents for loved ones birthdays, etc. Dave looked at me and deadpanned, "Why ... so you could still be living in a dreamworld?"
It's true. Although, life felt financially awesome, we were living beyond our means, spending foolishly on credit, all the while our unpaid accumulating taxes simmered below the surface.
Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen and six, result happiness.
Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.
~Charles Dickens, David Copperfield
I figured we weren't 'really' in debt because I assumed we could always pay any debt off within a few months if we really wanted to. That was when we had months of work lined up ahead of time with signed contracts and deposits. Now work has been trickling in. We still have work, but ahh! It is nerveracking at times to own your own business!
And, now we are worrying that the economy is just going to get worse.
The recent financial turmoil has many causes, but they are tied to a basic fear that some of the economic successes of the last generation may yet turn out to be a mirage. That helps explain why problems in the American subprime mortgage market could have spread so quickly through the world’s financial system. On Tuesday, Mr. Bernanke, who is now the Fed chairman, presided over the steepest one-day interest rate cut in the central bank’s history.
Now, some worry, comes the payback. Martin Feldstein, the éminence grise of Republican economists, says he is concerned that the economy “could slip into a recession and that the recession could be a long, deep, severe one.” In Monday’s Democratic debate Barack Obama made the same argument: “We could be sliding into an extraordinary recession,” he said.
Sigh.
I know that nothing is gained by worrying -- whether the market goes up or down .... whether our finances recover or crash -- God is sovereign and He loves me.
{grin} But, as the saying goes, money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons.
The number of abortions in the United States fell to the lowest level since the procedure was made legal some 35 years ago, according to a national study released Thursday.
The Guttmacher Institute, which researches issues pertaining to reproductive health and sexuality, said there were about 1.2 million abortions in 2005 -- 25 percent fewer than in 1990, when the number of abortions was about 1.6 million procedures.
Praise the Lord that less babies are dying, but wow ... 1.2 million! That is a staggering number. That is just over 3,287 abortions a day.
When Benjamin was dying there was a pediatric cardiologist who kept reminding me of my "option to terminate". Even after we told her that it was NOT an option, she brought it up 2-3 more times. I honestly felt like she was pressuring me to kill him! I felt like screaming at her, "Would you prefer to a) chemically burn his skin off; b) rip him limb from limb; c) have me take a pill, so that the lining of my uterus will disintegrate which would cause him starve to death; or d) begin to deliver him feet-first, halt his delivery when he is in the birth canal, stick a utensil into his brain to suck it out, and then finish his delivery?" I was literally shaking when we left that appointment. I wonder how many other expecting mothers she has pressured.
Japan is suffering a crisis of confidence these days about its ability to compete with its emerging Asian rivals, China and India. But even in this fad-obsessed nation, one result was never expected: a growing craze for Indian education.
...
India’s more demanding education standards are apparent at the Little Angels Kindergarten, and are its main selling point. Its 2-year-old pupils are taught to count to 20, 3-year-olds are introduced to computers, and 5-year-olds learn to multiply, solve math word problems and write one-page essays in English, tasks most Japanese schools do not teach until at least second grade.
(Click on the link above to read the entire article.)
Wow. I'm pretty academically focused, but that just seems crazy.
AT first glance, it doesn’t seem tragic that our leaders don’t study Latin anymore. But it is no coincidence that the professionalization of politics — which encourages budding politicians to think of education as mere career preparation — has occurred during an age of weak rhetoric, shifting moral values, clumsy grammar and a terror of historical references and eternal values that the Romans could teach us a thing or two about. As they themselves might have said, “Roma urbs aeterna; Latina lingua aeterna.”*
None of the leading presidential candidates majored in Latin. Hillary Clinton studied political science at Wellesley, as did Barack Obama at Columbia. Rudy Giuliani had a minor brush with the language during four years of theology at Bishop Loughlin Memorial High School in Brooklyn when he toyed with becoming a priest. But then he went on to major in guess what? Political science.
How things have changed since the founding fathers.
Of the 7,000 books originally in Thomas Jefferson’s library, only a couple of dozen are still at Monticello. The rest were sold off by his descendants, and eventually bought back by the Library of Congress. The best-thumbed of those remaining — on a glassed-in shelf in Jefferson’s study — is a copy of Virgil’s “Aeneid.”
Jefferson started learning Latin and Greek at age 9 at a school in Virginia run by a Scottish clergyman. When he was at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, a Greek grammar book was always by his side. Tacitus and Homer were his favorites.
High school, Jefferson thought, should center on Latin, Greek and French, with grammar and reading exercises, translations into English and the memorizing of famous passages. In 1819, when Jefferson opened the University of Virginia in Charlottesville (built according to classical rules of architecture), he employed only classically trained professors to teach Greek and Roman history.
This pattern of Latin learning continued for more than 150 years. Of the 40 presidents since Jefferson, 31 have studied Latin, many at a high level. James Polk graduated from the University of North Carolina, in 1818, with top honors in math and classics. James Garfield taught Greek and Latin from 1856 to 1857 at what is now Hiram College in Ohio. Teddy Roosevelt studied classics at Harvard.
"The budget approved by the board - which carried a 9% hike in property taxes that actually will be felt as a 6.27% increase when tax credits are included - will mark the third time in four years that city residents will face a property tax increase for schools of 7.75% or higher."
Official attendance figures for this fall, released by Milwaukee Public Schools officials, show that the enrollment in the traditional MPS schools is down for at least the ninth year in a row. Since 1998, the number of students in elementary, middle and high schools has declined from 96,942 to 81,381, a 16% drop. Between a year ago and now, the drop was 3,522, or more than 4%.
The bar for labeling a student proficient in reading and math is set lower in Wisconsin than in almost any other state among 26 in a study released Wednesday.
The average reading ability for fourth- and eighth-grade black students in Wisconsin is the lowest of any state, and the reading achievement gap between black students and white students in Wisconsin continues to be the worst in the nation.
You know, I wouldn't mind so much if I believed the tax increase would go to help the children.
Wisconsin's not underspending. We're already 12th-highest in per-pupil spending, 11% above the national average .... spending on benefits, at 57% above the national average, is eating the budget.
In the main funds used to pay for educating kids — the largest portions of the MPS budget — 75% of spending went to compensation for employees: 49% for salary and 26% for benefits, the report says.
Great article in the Chronicle of Higher Education!
Home-Schooled Students Rise in Supply and Demand
By PAULA WASLEY
For Katelin E. Dutill, high school began as soon as she woke up each day. During her senior year she would tackle her hardest courses first, while her 20-month-old sister was still asleep. That often meant taking a math or chemistry test and then turning to the teacher's manual to grade it, or logging on to her Advanced Placement macroeconomics course. Later she might read for her literature class while keeping one eye on her sister, or conduct Internet research for her paper on the historical accuracy of F. Scott Fitzgerald's novels.
This fall Ms. Dutill, who has been home-schooled since kindergarten, is experiencing a classroom for the first time, as a freshman at Cornell University. She is one of thousands of home-schoolers entering colleges and universities around the country. The home-school movement, once considered the domain of religious fundamentalists and hemp-wearing hippies, is all grown up and going off to college.
While exact numbers are hard to come by, recent estimates by the U.S. Department of Education place the home-schooled population at more than one million, or about 2 percent of the school-age population. As recently as 20 years ago, home schooling was illegal in many states. Today its students are edging toward the mainstream — and are eyed by some colleges as a promising niche market.
As an admissions officer at Stanford University in the 1980s, Jon Reider began fielding inquiries from home-schooled students who, he says, seemed to have the "intellectual spark" the university was looking for, but who came without the transcripts and teachers' recommendations that admissions offices rely on. He advised those students to take steps to reassure admissions officers: Take lots of standardized tests. Get a letter of recommendation from someone not related to you. Try taking a class at a local community college.
"College admissions people are a little like insurance adjusters," says Mr. Reider, who is now a college counselor at a San Francisco high school. "We don't want to sell insurance to people who smoke four packs a day."
The suggestions soon became codified as Stanford's written policy for home-schooled applicants, earning the university the reputation as one of the first to welcome them. The policy, he says, sent a message to home-schooled students: "We take you seriously. Now meet us halfway."
Years later, just about every college takes home-schoolers seriously, and admissions offices everywhere report increasing numbers of applications from them. In 2000, 52 percent of colleges had written policies, like Stanford's, to evaluate home-schooled candidates, according to a study by the National Association for College Admission Counseling. By 2004, 85 percent did.
(Aside to fans of The Office: I know it's crazy, but the first thing I thought of when I read where she went to college was Andy, LOL. And, "Oh, that was a really well constructed sentence. You should be an English professor at Cor-not University.")
Americans should not fear talking--and listening--to those whose views we loathe.
You don't want to judge Christ by Christians, someone once said. He is perfect, they are not.
In a similar way you don't want to judge capitalism by capitalists, or the legitimacy of democracy by the Democrats, or the vitality of our republic by the Republicans. You have to take the thing pure and in itself, while allowing for the flaws and waywardness of its practitioners.
I say this because here in America we have reached a funny pass. People are doing and saying odd things as if they don't know the meaning of the thing they say they stand for. In particular I mean we used to be proud of whom we allowed to speak, and now are leaning toward defining ourselves by whom we don't speak to and will not allow to speak. This is not progress.
I rarely, if ever, talk politics on my blog. But, I am stunned that the top tier Republican presidential candidates are either pro-abortion or recently were pro-abortion and have switched their positions. My friend The Tutor at Apollos Academy was the first person who brought Ron Paul to my attention. I came across this video last week:
Hi ... I'm Heather! I have been married for ten years and am a stay at home homeschooling mom to three boys. My blog title is taken from the book 'Stepping Heavenward' by Elizabeth Prentiss. We live in the wonderful state of Wisconsin.
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